


Goodbye

by JCapasso



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:00:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24765820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JCapasso/pseuds/JCapasso
Summary: What if Damon had laid it all out on the table after the trip to Denver? If he had actually told Elena how much she was hurting him with her actions?Starts from the end of 3x19
Relationships: Elena Gilbert/Damon Salvatore
Comments: 6
Kudos: 38





	Goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quick one shot that wouldn't let me sleep until I wrote it.

Damon had thought they were getting somewhere. Last night she had kissed him. And not just kissed him. She had surrendered to him, just as much as he had to her. Who knew what would have happened if Jeremy hadn’t interrupted them. But now she was pulling away again and he felt that hope come crashing down. “What are you doing?” he asked fearfully. 

“What do you mean?” she asked, turning to look at him. 

“Well…this trip…and you kissing me…what the hell is this?” he asked, feeling his heart ripping from his chest…again. 

Elena felt her heart beating out of her chest as she tried to force the words out and finally managed. “Stefan thinks I have feelings for you.” 

“Huh,” Damon said swallowing heavily. “Do you?” he asked forcing a casual tone. 

“I-I don’t…I don’t know,” Elena said helplessly. 

“Hmm,” Damon huffed. “I guess you thought this little trip could help you figure that out didn’t you?” he asked coldly. 

“No, that’s…”

“Or maybe you’re just hoping I’ll screw it up and make the decision for you. Am I wrong?” 

“Damon…”

“Am I wrong?” he asked again angrily. 

“It’s what you do, Damon,” Elena snapped. “You sabotage things. I mean, think about it. Every time there’s bump in the road, you…lash out.” 

“What if I didn’t?” Damon asked, moving close to her. “What if there was no bump?” When they got lost in each other’s eyes for a moment he moved back as his face turned hard. “Well I’m sorry, Elena. But this time I’m not gonna make it so easy for you. This time you’ll have to figure it out for yourself,” he sneered as he walked out. 

A few days later, Elena got a text message from Stefan. ‘Damon hasn’t come out of his room in three days. I’m worried.’

She sent back, ‘Is he drinking again?’

‘No. And that has me even more worried.’

‘I’ll come over and see if I can talk to him.’

Elena pulled into the boarding house and headed upstairs, Stefan nodded to her at the top of the stairs and jerked his head towards Damon’s room. Elena knocked on the door. “Go away Stefan.”

“I’m not Stefan.” 

“Okay, go away Elena.” 

She ignored him and went in anyway. She wasn’t going to let him avoid her. She stopped short at the sight that met her. She could immediately tell that Stefan was right and he wasn’t drinking. He was completely sober. Which just made the stake that he had in his hands even more worrying. “What are you doing?” she asked as evenly as she could manage. 

“Thinking,” Damon replied off-handedly. 

“About?” 

Damon looked up at her for the first time since she entered and she sucked in a sharp breath at the look in his eyes. “Oh, is this one of the days you care about me again? We really should mark the calendar. It would be nice to be able to prepare ahead of time when I’m about to have my heart ripped out,” he snarked. 

“I always care about you, Damon,” she said gently. 

“Right,” Damon scoffed. “Sure you do.” When she opened her mouth to speak again, he cut her off. “I’m not some toy that you can keep playing with Elena. I’m not a car you can take out for test drive and then walk away from. I /love/ you, Elena. With every fiber of my being. All I want is for you to be happy. If you love Stefan, then go be with Stefan. I can live with that. This…” he waved the stake around. “This thing you’ve been doing with me. This I /can’t/ live with. Because every time you reach out to me I think…just for a minute…that I actually have a chance to be /happy/ for once in my godforsaken life. That maybe…just maybe…I can finally have something good. And then you just snatch it away again. Every time.”

Tears filled her eyes as his words cut her to the bone. “Damon, I…”

“You talked about me lashing out. This is why, Elena. Because I’m being ripped to shreds and I can’t even breathe and I have to do something…anything…” He took a deep steadying breath, forcing himself to ignore the tears streaming down her cheeks because this had to be said and he could just let it go to save her feelings. Not anymore. “The thing that gets me is…you /know/ how I feel about you. You have to know how much it hurts. And if I had the ability I would just walk away. Just get in my car and drive and never step foot in this town again, but I /can’t/. I can’t just never see you again.”

“I’m sorry, Damon…”

“I’m not done,” he snapped, getting up off the bed and walking towards her. “I was thinking about Katherine. How she strung us both along too. But at least she was consistent. This is worse. Go to Stefan, Elena. Stop getting close to me. Stop kissing me. Stop giving me hope. Because after the one and only time I ever turned my humanity off, I swore to myself that I would die before I did again. So do me a favor,” he said coldly as he put the stake in her hands. “The next time you reach out to me like that…use this. At least show me that mercy.” He walked out of the room, down the stairs, and out the door, without so much as a glance back. 

Elena stood there frozen for a long moment before the stake fell from her hand and clattered to the floor and she fell to her knees. Or started to anyway. Stefan was there to catch her. Just like he always was. And that was part of the problem. Stefan was steady. Dependable. Grounding. Damon was Chaos. Wild. Free…and terrifying. After a moment, she pulled away from Stefan. No. She couldn’t do this. Damon was right. She had to make a choice. Neither of them deserved this. She got in her car and left. She wouldn’t be back until she’d chosen. Once and for all. 

Stefan sighed heavily and went looking for Damon, finding him standing on the side of the porch, leaning forward on the railing and looking out towards the woods blankly. “You really upset her you know.” 

“It needed to be said,” Damon said emotionlessly. He was all out of emotions for the day. 

“Did you mean it?” Stefan asked curiously, wondering if it was just to tug on her heartstrings. To push the choice he wanted. 

“Every word.” Damon turned and went back inside. So much for getting some fresh air. He just locked himself in his room again, picking up the stake from the floor and plopping back down on the bed with it, twirling it lazily in his hands. 

Stefan winced as he took Damon’s spot and tried to put himself in his brother’s shoes and as he thought back over just what he knew about, he got it. And he was sure there was a lot he didn’t know about. The little things that neither of them thought worth mentioning but meant the world to Damon. He could see why his brother felt that way. He probably would too. He suddenly felt bad about forcing that trip. But what else could he have done? He was watching her slip away and the more she tried to hold on the worse it got. 

Elena went home, locked herself in her room and cried. She knew that her heart had already made it’s choice. It had a long time ago even. Her head was the problem. It kept getting in the way. And it didn’t help that the choice her heart made terrified her. She had been trying so hard not to be Katherine and stick with one brother that she had become something worse. Someone that had broken Damon to the point where he preferred death. Hurt him so badly that he was on the verge of turning off his humanity just to escape it. 

He said that he lashed out because she was tearing him apart. She though back to the times he’d crossed a line. He’d threatened to turn her against her will after she lied to his face and betrayed him. He’d killed Jeremy after she lied to him about her feelings. He’d tried to kill Caroline’s dad after she kept pushing him to be more like Stefan as they got closer. Then she thought of all the times that he hadn’t lashed out. All the times she’d turned to Stefan when he needed her. All the things he’d done for her without asking anything in return. All the times that she could see the hurt in his eyes, but she just kept asking him for more. God, she really was worse than Katherine. At least Katherine had given him /something/. 

It was two days before she was ready to make her choice. No. Not make her choice. Her choice had already been made. It was two days before she was ready to /accept/ her choice. To give herself over to it and not look back. Two days before her conviction was set and her doubts banished. She pulled herself out of bed for the first time in that time and checked the phone that she had put on ignore. When she saw the missed calls from Stefan she felt bad, but when there weren’t any from Damon she felt even worse. There was just one simple text from Damon. ‘I’m not sorry for what I said, but I’m sorry it hurt you’, the text read. 

Elena took a quick shower before she headed out to the Salvatore’s. She hesitated a minute before she walked in which was stupid. It had been forever since she felt the need to ring the bell here. Even before the house officially belonged to her. She walked in and headed to her first stop. Stefan’s door was open and when he caught her eye as she came up, she reached back and undid her necklace and walked over to him. He closed his eyes for a moment and nodded as he held out his hand. When she placed the necklace there, he squeezed her hand for a moment and mouthed, ‘good luck’. She smiled tightly at him before heading to her next stop. 

Elena knocked on Damon’s door since it was closed and heard, “Come on in, Elena.” 

She opened the door and stepped inside as Damon closed a book and set it to the side. He was lounging on his bed shirtless and for a moment her brain shut down at the sight. And then the corner of her eye caught the stake that was still sitting on the bedside table and her mind got back on task. What she did next was partly to make a point and partly to see just how bad it was. How much she had to fix. She walked over and straddled his lap and before she could do anything else, he picked up the stake and put it in her hands and even moved it to his chest. In exactly the way he’d taught her. Up under the rib cage. Then he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the headboard and waited. 

“You were right,” Elena said softly, tears leaking from her eyes at how broken he was now. He truly was just going to sit there and let her kill him. Wanted her to kill him even. Would prefer that to how she’d treated him. She didn’t move the stake yet though. “You were right,” she said again with a sniffle. “This would have been far kinder than the way I’ve been treating you.” She set the stake back on the table. “But I won’t do it. I’m done hurting you, Damon. I don’t have any excuses, because there’s no excuse for what I’ve done. Nothing can justify it. But I can explain why…if you want to hear it.” 

Damon opened his eyes and met hers and Elena could see the desperation there even as he shrugged and his voice stayed light. “Might as well.” 

“I owe Stefan so much. He saved my life in the accident. He was there for me at my lowest point. He taught me how to live again. And now he’s at a low point and I didn’t want to turn my back on him. I know it’s no comfort to you, Damon, but I never meant to hurt you. That was the last thing I wanted. I was trying so hard to do the right thing that I ended up making things worse.” 

“So you hurt me to help him. I get it,” Damon said emotionlessly, trying to get up and dislodge her from his lap and get some distance. 

Elena put a hand on his chest to stop him as the other went to his cheek. “No, you /don’t/ get it, Damon.” Elena’s heart broke even more that even with all this he still instinctively closed his eyes and leaned into her touch. “Yes, I was trying to help him, but hurting you was never my intention. If I hadn’t been so blind to what I was doing…if I had known the trade-off, I would never have done it. I was blind and stupid and you never deserved any of it. You were right when you said I was worse than Katherine, and I don’t blame you if you never forgive me, but I still choose you, Damon.” 

Damon’s eyes snapped open and he turned away from her. “Please, Elena…don’t…” He couldn’t get any more words out than that. 

She ran a hand through his hair as the other hand wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I understand if you can’t handle this right now. If I’ve lost you forever then that’s on me. I know that. But it doesn’t change my choice. I love you, Damon. I will /always/ love you.” 

Damon scoffed. “A week ago it was ‘always Stefan’.” 

“Stefan was my first love and part of me will always love him. But /all/ of me loves you, Damon. So much so that no matter how hard I tried to ignore it I couldn’t. I was at war with myself and you got caught in the crossfire, and I wish more than anything that I could go back and do things differently.”

“What would you do differently?” Damon asked, wanting so badly to believe her, but not sure if he could. 

“I wouldn’t try so hard to hold onto Stefan. I would have told you both how I felt…”

“No, I mean specifically,” Damon said. “What point in this whole sordid affair would have diverged? What one moment would you pick to make this change?”

“There are so many,” Elena said sadly. “But if you’re asking for the first…” Damon nodded. “My birthday party. Just before it actually. Before we went down anyway.”

“And what would you have changed?” 

Elena’s lips twitched in a smile remembering that night. “When you came up I was about two seconds from just locking myself in the room and not going anywhere and then there you were and suddenly everything was better. Not great, but better. I could breathe again. You somehow became my rock without even realizing it. I would have told you that. I don’t think I was ready to admit that I had fallen in love with you yet, but that much I could have done.”

“And at what point did you first start falling in love with me?” he asked, desperately needing to be sure, but unable to resist touching her anymore as he ran his hands up her arms. “When did you first feel this connection we have?” 

Elena sighed and looked down, not wanting to admit this, but knowing that if she didn’t she might as well walk out right now and give up on ever having Damon. “That’s two separate answers,” she told him. “I first felt the connection between us when I asked you to trust me with the tomb. After Stefan and I had betrayed you and I wanted to fix it. I offered to let you compel me, but you didn’t. You /chose/ to trust me and when you did that I would have rather died than let you down again.” She took a deep breath before continuing. “I knew that the connection was more than friendship the day of the pageant. When you took Stefan’s place and we danced. I wouldn’t admit how much I lost myself in that moment. How comfortable I was in your arms.” 

“So I was right. You were lying when you said you would never kiss me back,” he had an almost smirk on his face. 

“Yes. You were. I was,” she admitted. 

“Why?” Damon asked. 

“Because…” Elena stopped herself realizing that she’d been even more stupid than she’d thought. 

“Why, Elena,” Damon asked firmly, already knowing the answer. 

“Because Stefan was going through a lot and I needed to stand by him,” she admitted. 

“You’re seeing the pattern now?” Damon asked sadly. 

“Yeah,” she sighed.

“And do you see why I can’t do this anymore?” he asked brokenly. 

Elena tried very hard not to start crying again as she swallowed a few times around the lump in her throat. “Yeah. I do,” she managed to say as she went to move off him and leave before she fell apart. 

Damon gripped her wrist though and didn’t let her go anywhere. “Everyone has their breaking point Elena, and I’ve reached mine. If you go back again…” he trailed off with a desperate look at her. 

“I won’t,” she breathed out, daring to hope and that hope soared when Damon’s lips crashed into hers and she kissed him back desperately. 

Stefan gave a sad smile as he heard them work it out and when he heard them moving beyond kissing, he got up and put the necklace back in it’s box, closing it up and putting it in the desk drawer. Not only had he lost her, but he realized now that she’d never truly been his to begin with.


End file.
